Chapter One You Are Responsible for the Safe Operation and Cleanliness of This Vehicle On June 3, 2003, I was standing out in front of Margo's house, chilling with Conor, my four-year-old nephew, and my mom. We were waiting for my mom's pal Margo, a dyslexic ex-stripper who had transformed herself into a mover and shaker in the L.A. world of social services. Margo had grown up in Indiana Catholic schools and still had small scars on her knuckles from where she was smacked with the thin metal edge of the Catholic reading remediation program known as "the ruler." Among Margo's many other business ventures was a bus company. The previous December, over coffee at her home in the "Black Beverly Hills," she had offered to find me a short school bus to live out of for the next four months. "I get shit done," Margo had said as my mom chimed in with an inspired "uh huh.
" As we left, I was told to ask no more questions. Margo would take care of the bus. Five months and eighteen thousand dollars later, she had lived up to her promise, and the proof was sitting in front of her house: one hell of a short school bus. Margo had the keys, however, and as was often the case, she was well over an hour late. So Conor and I stared at the bus. Newly painted, it looked slightly unstable, parked on the hill, its weight leaning in a way that seemed somewhat precarious. But it was what had wanted, a short bus, yellow and black, twenty feet long, and ten feet tall. Drawing his face up like he had just eaten a lemon, Conor asked, "What is your bus's name, Jonny?" "I have no idea, man," I said.
"Well, Jonny," Conor said in his adult voice, "you know, things need a name." He was right. So as we waited I thought of all the names kids have for these vehicles: the tard cart, the cheese box, the short bus. None of them fit anymore, but I had no idea what did. "That's OK, Jonny," Conor said. "You can name it later." A more pressing problem: My trip was in complete disarray. I was supposed to depart in three weeks but had no idea where I was going or how to get there.
I'm one of those folks for whom large things (like driving around the country in a short school bus) seem easy. But now my optimism seemed ephemeral, flimsy. As the sun broke through the L.A. mix of the marine layer, smoke, and stale air, Conor turned to me and said, "Jonny, why do you have to go live in that bus?" I had been diagnosed as dyslexic at the end of third grade. I had faked reading most of my life and had actually dropped out of school for a time in sixth grade. In high school a guidance counselor gave me a fifty-fifty chance of graduating. I slipped into my first university, Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, as a soccer player on scholarship.
And yet "miraculously" I managed to graduate in 2000 from Brown University with a 4.0 GPA in English literature, despite having the phonic awareness and reading rate of a seventh grader and being a third-grade level speller. In most people's minds and, in all honesty, mine as well, I had overcome. What the hell was I doing waiting for an ex-stripper to bring me the keys to a short school bus? On the most obvious level, the bus represented a path set in motion when I was eight years old and labeled learning disabled. I was drawn to the short bus because it was a public symbol of disability and special education. The bus emerged out of federal legislation, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975, which mandated that children with disabilities be educated in a public school setting. It was a historic moment for my tribe, but there were problems: Schools were not required to fully integrate students with disabilities, and a segregated system of special education programs was created. Then along came segregated transportation: the short bus.
Thrown together under the rubric of special education, these passengers included kids with physical disabilities, Down syndrome, learning disabilities, autism, as well as emotional problems. Special education and the short bus grouped together all these different students, expanding our culture's definition of disabled. The short bus as a symbol of special education says as much (or more) about that culture-its values, beliefs, fears, aspirations, and injustices-as it ever did about people with disabilities. Conor and I stood at a respectful distance from the bus. As I eyed it, the magnitude of the situation struck me: This would be my home for the next four months. This vehicle was supposed to transport me from L.A., through the southern states, up to Maine, across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, to the shores of the Pacific Northwest, down the coast riding Highway 101 and then Highway 1 back home.
Conor tapped my leg and said, "Jonny, I don't think I would want to live in that thing if I was you." "No shit," I said, taking a seat on the pavement. Conor, talking to himself, flew Buzz Lightyear around the universe in his mind. Sometimes I think of Conor as the kid that I lost in special ed. He reminds me of the full-of-life version of me who was obsessed with the show Roots and who used to run around the house yelling, "Kunta Kinte!" He's like the three-year-old me who had tapped on the window of a doughnut shop until a young woman came up to him, and then demanded, "Give me a fucking jelly doughnut, you bitch." I looked at Conor and then at the short bus, and I knew that buried somewhere in that yellow siding was the kid I wanted back. When Margo's car finally pulled up, Conor pointed Buzz Light year at her and said, "It doesn't matter if you're black, Margo, because I'm green." "Really.
OK, green man," Margo said. "Here comes Wes's black ass right now with them keys." Wes was the man Margo had put in charge of finalizing our transaction. After parking his car, he walked up and I shook his hand. "Let's go see your bus," he said. So we stood there, staring at the thing. Conor said, "Jonny, you can't drive that. You have no license.
The cops took Jonny's license for driving like a drunk." The little man was right. In part because of a 1996 DUI, I hadn't had a license for more than five years. But in 2003, I had passed my road test and been issued a temporary license. I was still smarting from the experience. When I had confused a right from a left turn, the DMV evaluator insulted me by asking if I was "retarded." On my temporary license were disparaging comments such as driver is "distracted" and "shows poor decision-making in traffic." "Here you go, "Wes said, handing over the key.
"You got yourself one short school bus." I stepped inside and sat down in the driver's seat. The air conditioner, for which I had paid an extra $1,500, hummed. The bus was cool and smelled like rubber and disinfectant. But, more than anything else, it smelled like school, and I felt a mixture of fear and shame. I looked at the speedometer-it read 150,000 miles, not 15,000 as promised. But at that moment none of that mattered. Two years of work had led me here, and now I was sitting in the bus, in the driver's seat, alone.
I waited for my mom to pull out in front of me. Here it was, the first mile, to Raintree, my family's apartment complex. I put the bus in drive, took my foot off the brake, and felt the bus jerk forward with a force that sent me back into my seat. It was out of control. I turned the wheel both ways, and the bus didn't respond. It felt like I was driving a boat speeding down La Cienega Boulevard. I was going only thirty-five miles per hour, but it sounded and felt like I was going eighty. I couldn't see out of the side mirrors.
I kept thinking thirty thousand miles, thirty thousand miles, thirty thousand miles. A long way to go. Pulling into the apartment complex, past the guard gates, toward the guest parking, I spotted a parking space and turned the bus toward the curb, crashing into a tree. Conor got out of my mom's car, pointed Buzz up over his head, and said, "Maybe they shouldn't have given Jonny a new license after all." I woke up the next morning, my first full day in L.A., to my dog, Max, pissing in the corner of my makeshift bedroom in the middle of my parents' den. Running over to my futon, he licked my face.
Max was not a youthful creature, though my mom had insisted that he was nine years old for the past six or seven years. At one point, we were told that he was a fifty-fifty mix of golden retriever and yellow Lab. But after my mom got a dog calendar for Christmas featuring different exotic breeds every month, she became convinced that Max was really a Rhodesian ridgeback-our family's last hope for a pedigree. I wasn't mad that Max had almost pissed on me. No one really got angry at any of our insane dogs. My family's carpets always reeked of urine. It wasn't until I went to Brown and visited my college friends' houses that I realized it was not the norm to have the carpets smell like a zoo. I quickly learned that there are two types of people in this world: those whose carpets reek and those whose carpets do not.
I accept the fact that my family falls into the first category, and I'm more comfortable around people who know this sort of secret shame. I grabbed a cup of joe and prepared to face my first full day in L.A. My plan was to drive to my former school, Penny Camp Elementary, and get my old records if they hadn't been discarded or buried at some storage facility. I wasn't in the best of moods that morning. The night before, when I arrived, my pops had already started on the Jack Daniel's. My dad waits all day for that designated time to drink. Then he sits alone in his cheap faux-leather chair, listening to a rotating selection of classical music.
He's always had this kind of chair. Families lik.